David Galenson offers a lineage of Contemporary artists who have worked to remove their own hand from painting. From Yves Klein to Andy Warhol to Sol LeWitt.
[I]t is readily understandable why David Hockney had to withdraw his criticism of Damien Hirst’s painting by proxy. For Hockney’s criticism applied not only to Hirst, but to one of the most vital trends in the advanced art of the past 50 years. Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst are only the most famous of the painters of recent years who have rarely if ever touched their own canvases. Painting by proxy simply appears too firmly established in the modern canon to challenge successfully. As Warhol succinctly explained in 1966, “In my art work, hand painting would take too long and anyway that’s not the age we’re living in. Mechanical means are today.”
Painting by Proxy (Huffington Post)
